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We should have learned that when you take AGENCY away from a creature, they become more and more stressed until their mental health collapses, breaks irreparably. This was the most important meta result of these studies.
We can place no agency, total helplessness, not being able to escape the pain and suffering (which these animals experienced in their thousands) on one pole of an axis, where mental health is completely destroyed; and this creates inevitably another pole on the opposite side, where mental health must flourish - the perfect agency, where you can help yourself, where you do have choices, where freedom resides.
In other words:
The ability to "self help" is one, if not the, most important factor in mental health.
It would not be a leap of faith to hypothesize that the ability to self help precedes the ability to help anyone else.
Self help, aka agency, is therefore not just a prerequisite of individual mental health, it is also the prerequisite for healthy human relationships.
Indeed, the GoE has been using the following progression for personal and professional growth since 2002:
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1. Self Help: Literally, helping yourself, regaining agency over your own self.
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2. Helping one other: The practitioner level.
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3. Helping a whole group: The trainer level.
This is an organisational structure which encompasses how an individual gains more agency towards leadership of many; but clearly, without Step 1, there can be no evolution.
Agency starts with personal agency, with the ability to help yourself, first of all. Agency is the most important, most precious faculty of any human being.
And that is why self help isn't a dirty word - only for those who want to keep people as eternal patients, eternal victims, without agency, or as laboratory animals.
Silvia Hartmann
November 2025
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Pavlov tortured his dogs until they went mad; BF Skinner's pigeons were pecking their beaks bloody and Seligman's dogs becoming catatonic.